Cheapest platform as error volume grows
Hosts, users and ingestion held at your current inputs — only monthly error events change per row. Datadog and New Relic don't meter error events directly, so watch how Sentry's overage eventually catches up to their flat per-host / per-user cost.
| Error events / mo | Sentry | Datadog | New Relic | Cheapest |
|---|
Why per-event, per-host and per-user-plus-per-GB billing shapes matter
Error tracking and APM tools don't compete on a single price — they compete on which dimension of your stack they choose to meter. Sentry bills base plan + max(0, error events − included events) × overage rate, so a Team plan starts near $29/month and only climbs once your error volume clears the included quota (roughly 50,000 events on Team) — great for teams with a handful of noisy services and a lot of hosts, since Sentry doesn't care how many machines those errors came from. Datadog flips that entirely: APM bills hosts × price per host (about $31-40/host/month on Pro/Enterprise annual), with each host bundling a generous span-ingestion allowance — so a large fleet costs the same whether it throws ten errors or ten million, which is brutal for a big infrastructure footprint but forgiving for a buggy small one. New Relic goes a third direction, charging full-platform users × seat rate + max(0, ingested GB − free GB) × GB rate with no per-host fee at all — cheap for a small team monitoring a huge fleet, expensive once log/trace/metric ingestion volume climbs past the free allowance.
There is no vendor whose sticker price represents your bill without knowing which dimension — error count, host count, or data volume — your usage actually stresses. A five-person team running 200 lightweight hosts might find New Relic and Sentry far cheaper than Datadog; a two-person team running one host that throws millions of errors a month might find the reverse. Run your own numbers above instead of trusting a vendor's homepage price.
How this calculator works
The Sentry vs Datadog vs New Relic Cost Calculator compares three vendor pricing shapes — Sentry (base plan + per-error-event overage), Datadog (per-host APM) and New Relic (per-user + per-GB ingestion) — at your monthly error volume, host count, user seats and data ingested. Sentry's cost is base plan + max(0, error events − included events) × overage rate; Datadog is hosts × price per host with no error-count metering; and New Relic is users × seat rate + max(0, ingested GB − free GB) × GB rate with no host fee. The calculator shows all three totals side by side, then a separate table isolates all three vendors across a range of error-event volumes at your current hosts/users/ingestion, so you can see where Sentry's overage eventually overtakes Datadog's and New Relic's flat components.
These are representative pricing shapes based on typical published ranges (Sentry Team plan ≈$29/mo with tiered per-error overage; Datadog APM Pro/Enterprise ≈$31-40/host/month annual billing; New Relic full-platform users ≈$99-549/mo with ≈$0.30-0.60/GB ingestion above a 100GB free allowance), not live vendor quotes — actual pricing varies by plan tier, contract term, retention settings and negotiated enterprise terms, and all three vendors offer custom enterprise pricing above their published self-serve tiers. Always confirm current pricing directly with the vendor before budgeting.
Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry cheaper than Datadog for error tracking?
Usually yes for teams with a modest number of monitored hosts, because Sentry meters error events (with a low base plan fee) while Datadog meters hosts at roughly $31/host/month regardless of how many errors those hosts throw. A team with 10 hosts and 200,000 errors/month typically pays around $80-90/mo on Sentry's Team plan versus roughly $310/mo on Datadog APM — but flip that ratio (few hosts, huge error volume) and Sentry's per-event overage can climb past Datadog fast. These are representative published ranges, not live quotes — always confirm current pricing with the vendor before budgeting.
Why is Datadog priced per host instead of per error or per user?
Datadog's APM product bundles distributed tracing, infrastructure metrics and span ingestion into a single per-host fee (about $31-40/host/month on Pro/Enterprise annual billing), because its core value is correlating errors with the exact host, container and trace that produced them — not just counting error occurrences. That means Datadog's bill scales with your infrastructure footprint, not your bug count: a fleet of 50 hosts costs the same whether they throw 10 errors or 10 million, which is very different from Sentry's per-event model.
How does New Relic's per-user plus per-GB pricing compare to Sentry and Datadog?
New Relic charges full-platform users roughly $99-549/month per seat (edition-dependent) plus a per-GB data ingestion fee — commonly cited around $0.30-0.60/GB above a 100GB/month free allowance — with no per-host charge at all. That makes New Relic cheapest for small teams with few full-platform users regardless of how many hosts or services they run, but it can get expensive fast once data ingestion volume climbs, since every log line, trace and metric counts toward the GB total.
Which is cheapest — Sentry, Datadog or New Relic?
There's no universal winner because each vendor meters a completely different dimension. Sentry wins for teams with a small number of hosts and a moderate, predictable error volume. Datadog wins (relatively) once you need deep infrastructure/APM correlation across many hosts but keep your team small. New Relic wins for a small full-platform user count with low-to-moderate data ingestion, since it charges nothing extra per host. Run your own error volume, host count, user seats and data-ingestion figures through the calculator above instead of assuming a vendor's headline number applies to you.